I think tesla is scaling up pretty well, considering.

It's almost like a chip company launching at this point and building its own fab.

So, Tesla just will not be able to scale up like a a software company or a company like apple that doesn't own a fab.

This is a fantasy. Tesla sells cars, not chips. A chip manufacturing company can sell 1M chips this year and 100M two years from now. A car company cannot even go from 1M to 2M without a lot of effort. It is not a business that can scale easily, especially not at the price point at which Tesla is operating.

A more proper comparison might be revenue instead of units sold. Otherwise I could compare Intel's 8051 sales figures which dwarf AMD's gpu sales figures.

(and tesla does make their own chips)

> "Tesla has sold fewer than a million cars since 2012."

At the end of 2019, Tesla's cumulative global sales were 891,000 units. They are targeting 500,000 for 2020 alone, so will be well over a million by now.

Tesla are very much in the process of scaling up, with massive factories under construction in Germany and Texas, and major expansion underway at the Shanghai factory. These factories will each be able to produce more than 500,000 vehicles per year.